Mommy Man (7 page)

There was another benefit, too. Unlike adoption, as amazing and generous as that can be, with surrogacy we’d actually be creating a life. Our baby would exist only because, against all odds, Drew and I met and fell in love. It just seemed so beautifully ordinary.

Mindy knew a man named Wes, who ran a surrogacy agency specifically for gay couples. It was called Rainbow Extensions, and Wes wasn’t just the president; he was also one of their first clients. He and his partner had two surro-kids. We called him that afternoon.

“You two are doing something very few people before you have done,” Wes began. “You’re pioneers!”

Throughout our call, we could hear Wes’s kids in the background—playing, fighting, requesting juice. It was a glimpse into what we hoped our future would be. Wes was very patient as we lobbed questions at him.

“Where do you find your surrogates?”

“Are they doing this for the money or because they love the idea of helping gay dads?”

“How do we know the surrogate isn’t pounding back cosmos and binging on sushi all weekend while our baby mutates into a sloth-like monster inside of her?”

He’d heard them all before, and he had all the answers we were hoping to hear—at least until we got to the issue of what happened after the baby came. We wanted to know if the surrogate would stay a part of our lives.

“We send our surrogates a card at Christmas,” he explained. “That’s really all they want.”

He thought he was reassuring us, but we were disappointed. So the woman who brought our child into the world would be nothing to them but an address label?

“Okay,” I asked. “But what about the egg donor?”

“What about her?”

“Can we find one who’ll stay in touch?”

“Absolutely not! You’ll never hear from her again, and I assure you, you don’t want to!” He was starting to get testy.

“But don’t kids ask questions about her?”

“All they need is a first name and a picture, which Rainbow Extensions provides. Our kids are perfectly satisfied with that.”

“Your kids are still young. As they get older, won’t they . . .”

Wes cut me off. “All they need is a first name and a picture.”

“Come on. It’s only natural they’ll be curious about their biological mother.”

It was at about that moment that Wes achieved spontaneous combustion.

“Okay, let me stop you right there,” he said, trying his best to stay calm. “I want to make one thing perfectly clear. Your child will have two fathers. He or she will have a surrogate and an egg donor. But there will be . . .” He took a long pause for dramatic effect, or perhaps to pinch his diaphragm for maximum volume. “. . . NO! MOTHER!!!!!”

It turned out I’d uttered the dirty word of surrogacy. The M-word was strictly verboten. It was more than a matter of semantics. It was an issue of pride. With so many people questioning whether two dads were qualified to raise a child, some felt it was crucial to designate who was doing the heavy lifting and whose commitment was over after a few trips to the doctor. No one in this arrangement was worthy of the M-word, the thinking went, especially not egg donors. Most egg donors wanted nothing to do with the M-word anyway.

Unlike surrogates, who’d finished having their own babies, egg donors tended to be younger and unattached. They were happy to help strangers start families, but only on the condition that the kids they made would never track them down and weird out their real kids or, for that matter, their husband. They were often students working their way through college, and they wanted to collect their fee without amassing any baggage. All we would have would be a first name and a picture.

It didn’t seem fair. We wanted to be totally up front with our kid about how we made him or her. We were pioneers after all. Who doesn’t love a good adventure tale?

No matter who you are, you deserve to know where you came from. It’s Your Story. Your Story starts with how your parents met and fell in love, how they found out they were pregnant, the rush of pure joy they felt when they brought you home for the first time—something to counteract the clinical sperm-meets-egg stuff and make every kid feel special.

Adoptive parents may have to gloss over a few unpleasantries in the first act of their Your Story—the ethnic cleansing perhaps—but they’ve got a killer climax. “We had some love to share, and you needed a home. Out of seven billion people on this planet, we found each other, and we knew right away we were meant to be a family.”

In contrast, what Your Story would we tell our kid? “Well, we found a couple of total strangers who needed some cash, we completed a series of business transactions and bam, the doctor worked his magic in a petri dish.” Then we’d give them a first name and a picture and shut down any follow-up questions with, “Sorry, that’s all Rainbow Extensions says you need.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Drew assured me. “You can’t plan a kid’s birth story beforehand. The story is what happens as you go along.”

“What if it’s like Wes says? ‘You have no mommy. Stop asking.’”

“It won’t be like that.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because it’s us. Our surrogate and egg donor won’t be mommies, but they’re not going to be business partners, either. We’ll get to know them. We’ll let them into our lives. They’ll be as close to us as we want them to be.”

“And we’ll stay in touch?”

“You think a surrogate is going to spend nine months with us and then walk away?” Drew put his arm around me. “We’re awesome, remember?”

5

Um, Sperm

“S
o whose sperm
are you going to use? Yours or Drew’s?”

I knew coming out of the closet would mean sacrificing some privacy, but I never expected that a few years later, I’d be having this conversation with my mom.

This was an unforeseen downside of surrogacy—the spermification of my life. Once Drew and I decided to give surrogacy a shot, suddenly everyone I knew felt comfortable discussing the flagellating residents of my man junk—friends, neighbors, bosses.

“You given a sperm sample yet?”

“What’s your sperm count?”

“Better hope your boys are swimmers!”

No one dropped more S-bombs than our caseworker at Rainbow Extensions. She spoke a language that sounded much like English at first, until you realized that in her native tongue, every fifth word was the clinical name of the male reproductive cell.

“Who’s sperm we gonna use?” she asked. “We need to collect your sperm, test your sperm, sperm your sperm, and enspermanize your spermological spermograms.” This was what SpermEnglish sounded like.

Her name was S’mantha. S. Apostrophe. Mantha. In her picture on the Rainbow Extensions website we could see she had frizzy red hair and elongated brown-white teeth that looked like unwaxed snowboards. Her blouse appeared to have been made from the sofa cushions my parents had growing up, and if I told her that, she’d probably be flattered. “How nice! I recycle everything!”

On our very first phone call with her, S’mantha informed us that she’d already booked a visit for us to the Westside Fertility Center. “Nothing to worry about,” she assured us. “They just need a bit o’ sperm!”

It was then I discovered a topic even more awkward than sperm itself: what you have to do to produce the sperm. Sure, I knew the procedure pretty well, but it was never something I’d done in a doctor’s office.

Into a plastic cup.

While a nurse waited outside for me to finish.

As if all that pressure wasn’t enough, I’d have to make do without the standard accoutrements to which I’d become so accustomed—tender mood lighting, a can of diet A&W root beer, and a faded VHS of
Dances with Wolves
, cued up to the skinny-dipping river bath scene.

Or would I?

“You might want to bring your own materials,” S’mantha informed me.

“Materials?”

“You know? Materials. To assist in collecting your sperm.” Surprisingly, the word “porn” didn’t seem to exist in SpermEnglish.

S’mantha explained that Westside Fertility catered to a mostly straight clientele, so she couldn’t guarantee the availability of the particular genre of “materials” that would help Drew and me produce our sperm.

As much as I resented that our fertility clinic couldn’t accommodate us with the appropriate smut, I was kind of pleased to have a good excuse to buy porn. How often does that happen? All of my porn shopping memories were so bleak and demoralizing.

For one thing, buying a dirty magazine was the most blatant way of announcing my sexuality, before I was ready to do that. When I purchased my first stroke mag, it wasn’t just an awkward step toward becoming a skuzzy grown man. It was a giant leap out of the closet. You could argue that the first person I ever truly came out to was the cashier at Newspaper Nirvana on 75th and Broadway.

I was a senior at Columbia University, about two miles uptown, and I was doing what I always did at newsstands, reading
Billboard
. It was kind of an exciting week. Color Me Badd was proving they were no one-hit wonder with “I Adore Mi Amore” up nine spots to number six, and a hot new rap outfit from East Orange, New Jersey, was making its debut at number 85 with “O.P.P.” I predicted a bright future for Naughty by Nature.

That’s when I noticed something even more shocking than the staying power of “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)” by Bryan Adams—a shelf of glossy magazines with chest-bearing men on the cover.

It was porn, there among the general magazine population. Sure, like most newsstands, this one had its porn prison, secreted away behind the cash register. Each sleaze rag was sealed in plastic and partially obscured so that if you wanted to buy it, you had to ask for it. “Pardon me, my good man, but might you sell me a copy of the latest
Big Black Asses
?”

There was no way I could ever utter a sentence like that aloud, even to a complete stranger, so I had resigned myself to a pornless life. But for some reason, this store’s porn prison featured only straight smut. The gay stuff was filed under “Men’s Interest,” adjacent to the “Music” section, where I was standing. It seemed the nice older gentleman in the turban who owned this particular establishment was oblivious to what was displayed in the pages of
Honcho
,
Torso
, and
Latin Inches
, all of which shared shelf space with
Details
and
GQ
. I stole nervous glances from behind my
Billboard
, my eyes zeroing in on a particular periodical called
Freshmen
.

The cover featured a blond, blue-eyed frat boy in a wrestling singlet and mouth guard. To a straight, possibly Sikh, newsstand owner, it could have passed for a workout magazine, but my sperm knew that its objective wasn’t just to get your pecs hard.

Jerry
, my sperm whispered.
It’s porn!

“Shut up, sperm! It can’t be! You can’t just leave porn out like that! There are laws!”

But my sperm was persistent.
I bet they never even opened a copy before they shelved it. Ha ha! The fools!

“Just let me look at
Billboard
in peace!”

Heyyyyyy . . . that wrestler on the cover looks a little like the guy from Color Me Badd, dontcha think? Without the goatee and earring? You ever wonder what a guy like that might look like . . . naked?

Well, yes. I couldn’t lie to my sperm. Yes, I had thought about what the guy from Color Me Badd might look like naked, clean-shaven, and unpierced—perhaps even in a wrestling singlet and mouth guard.

Buy it!

“It’s dirty!”

You’re a grown man!

“I’m a nice boy!”

Buy it! C’mon, let’s raise the stakes! We’re tired of freeze-framing Costner’s ass!

“I want to . . . but I can’t! Not now! I need to psyche myself up, get in the right frame of mind. Maybe in a couple of months . . .”

A couple of months? This isn’t like buying something else you’d be humiliated to ask for—like cigarettes or a Michael Bolton CD. This is easily accessible porn! How long do you think it’ll stick around?

My sperm had a good point. This was the lucky break of a lifetime. There were no other customers in the store, no one to fear but the cashier, who, let’s face it, was a professional man. He wasn’t going to say anything to me. Why would he care what type of naked pictures I liked to look at? My money wasn’t gay. And who was he to be high and mighty anyway? He’d already bought gay porn, too—from the distributor. Maybe he’d judge me quietly, but so what? I wasn’t getting into his Nirvana anyway. Then again, why would he judge me at all? He didn’t even know it was porn!

I was already holding the perfect porn shield.
Billboard
was twice the size of
Freshmen
. With the
US News
college rankings on the other side, my filth would be virtually incognito. Just to be safe, I also picked up
Time
,
Newsweek
, the
New Yorker
,
Rolling Stone
,
Spin
,
TV Guide
,
People,
and
Nintendo Power
. This way, I wouldn’t arouse any suspicion at all.

The cashier rang me up methodically. He didn’t even look at what I was buying. He just slid each magazine in my stack enough to see the price of the one below it, then moved on to the next one.

It’s working! We’re buying porn!

Then, when he got to
Freshmen
, he stopped cold.

He dug it out of the pile, held it up, examined it.

Oh shit, I thought. He knows. He’s going to ask for ID. He’s going to spit on me. He’s going to call me a fag and make me cry.

Hahahahaha!
My sperm laughed maniacally.
You’re so busted!

“Shut up, sperm! This is your fault!”

The cashier flipped
Freshmen
over and examined the back, which featured a Speedo-clad hunk in an ad for a phone sex line. There was no hiding anymore. It was possible the cover model existed in some kind of gray area between wholesomeness and gay fantasy. But 1-900-HOT-SPUNK did not.

As the cashier stood holding the magazine for what seemed like the entire fall semester, a woman entered with her eight-year-old daughter in tow. They scanned the candy racks for gum. Any second, they’d be right behind me in line. The little girl would giggle innocently, and the mom would inquire, “Daisy, what are you looking at?” Daisy would point up at the leering wrestler, and her mom would scream, “Police! Police!” I thought about making a break for it.

Then the cashier’s finger tapped the wrestler’s knee. He nodded knowingly and opened his mouth. Oh, shit. Here it comes. “Five ninety-five,” he said, gesturing toward the bar code. Then he rang up my porn and put it back in the pile. He stuffed my purchases into a clear plastic bag and slid it across the counter to me.

The see-through bag proved it. He had no idea this was adult material, or he would have hidden it in a brown paper bag inside another bag inside a third bag, then directed me to exit quietly out the back. That’s what I imagined happened when you bought porn, at least.

Instead, I found myself descending the steps to the 1/9 subway line, on my way back to my dorm room to peer beyond the singlet. I had gotten away with the scam of a lifetime, and it only cost me $50 in magazines I had no intention of reading. As the train came screaming into the station, my euphoria ebbed, and I realized where I now stood. I was forty blocks from campus, six subway stops from home. And the only thing protecting me from total exposure was a clear plastic bag, weighed down with enough magazines to fill the waiting room at the Mayo Clinic.

Buying porn was now the number two scariest thing I’d ever done. Getting it back to John Jay Hall Room 1117 was number one with a bullet.

I stood in the crowded subway car, with one hand on a railing and the bag squeezed tightly between my legs to keep it from falling over. I prayed I wouldn’t lose my balance, that the bag wouldn’t break open, and that no one would see inside and say, “Hey, can I check your
Billboard
for a second? I hear the Scorpions are making a comeback.” Any jostling could bring
Freshmen
to the fore and expose me to the world.

As I walked across campus, I clasped the bag tightly with both hands, like a bank robber shielding a satchel full of hundred-dollar bills as he searched for his getaway car. By some miracle, I didn’t see a single person I knew. Maybe it’s because I had my head down and refused to make eye contact with anyone. But soon I was in my dorm room, enjoying my prize.

My sperm had been right.
Freshmen
was porn—beautiful, glorious porn. It was relatively new, an offshoot of a magazine named
Men
, whose models were, presumably, not quite as fresh. It was kind of a classier gay version of
Barely Legal
. Each issue featured four models, ranging in age from their late teens to their late-late teens, old enough to vote but not to buy Zima. They were a diverse array of types, like the members of a boy band. There was one baby-faced innocent, one jock, one ethnic, and one guy with a single tattoo, the token rebel. If the pictures could speak, he’d probably be rapping, poorly.

Each dude was posed to suggest some activity that young people were known to engage in, only with an unexplained emphasis on his genitalia. You’d see a hot guy with his schlong draped over a soccer ball or splayed out on a professor’s desk while resting his balls atop an apple. It was sexy, it was exciting, it was totally fucking absurd. You really expect a teacher to eat that apple? Gross! There was no way to attach a narrative to these photo spreads. Most just fell under what I considered an “Oops! I Forgot My Pants!” scenario.

“Hey, just thought I’d come shoot some hoops . . . and Oops! I forgot my pants!”

“Yo, I swung by to study for our Econ final tomorrow . . . and Oops! I forgot my pants!”

“So I cleaned out the filters, checked the chlorine levels and . . . hey, what are you looking at? Oh, man, this is embarrassing.”

It was silly, but that was what I needed. I wasn’t ready to take sex seriously. I just wanted to imagine a world where regular dudes occasionally forgot to wear pants.
Freshmen
, you’d found your newest fan.

Sixteen years later, I stood in a sex shop on Melrose Avenue. I didn’t have to look hard to find the gay shelves here. There was bear porn, grandpa porn, weird fetishistic import porn. Glossy pro porn as polished and glam as the latest
Vanity Fair
and homemade porn zines that looked like they came off a dot-matrix printer in a cave somewhere in Idaho. All the oiled, throbbing dicks on display would have given twenty-one-year-old me a nervous breakdown.

The choices were virtually endless, but I decided to make my decision easy and picked up a
Freshmen
. I loved how easy it was to buy it this time. I just walked to the counter and paid. If the cashier had asked, I was prepared to shrug and say, “Yeah, I like cock. Do you validate parking?” But of course, that didn’t happen. And this dude knew just where to find the price: $8.99.

A few days after that, I brought my purchase with me to the Westside Fertility Center, safely stored in a brown paper bag inside another bag inside a third bag, just in case. The receptionist seemed confused when Drew and I told her our names. She scanned her desk for our file, but it wasn’t there.

So we dropped the secret password. Ahem. “We’re with Rainbow Extensions.”